November 2008 Stories

Dedicated Mentor Honored as Professor of the Year

Professor Richard Ellis has written or co-edited 13 books and numerous journal articles on the American presidency and American political culture, and he’s frequently quoted in national and regional media for his expertise. But if you ask him to discuss his research, he would rather steer the conversation towards teaching.

“You can learn so much about how to teach from people who are willing to talk about their teaching, about what works and what doesn’t,” he says. “I’ve learned a tremendous amount from watching and talking with my colleagues at Willamette.”

Ellis’ successful classroom style and dedication to students recently garnered him the prestigious 2008 Oregon Professor of the Year Award.

Ellis, the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics, is Willamette’s ninth professor to be honored. Past winners are Jerry Gray, economics, 2005; Suresht Bald, politics, 2003; William Duvall, history, 1998; Daniel Montague, physics, 1995; Arthur Payton, chemistry, 1994; Roger Hull, art history, 1993; Mary Ann Youngren, psychology, 1991; and Frances Chapple, chemistry, 1990.

“I feel honored to be in the same category as the other outstanding Willamette professors who have received this award,” Ellis says. “The award is an affirmation for me that it’s possible to be both a good scholar and a good teacher.”

Ellis has already received quite a bit of attention for his scholarship. To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance was featured on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” and received the Langum Prize in Legal History. His latest, Presidential Travel: The Journey from George Washington to George W. Bush, came out during the height of election season and had reporters nationwide calling to discuss the history of presidents on the road.

His research and publishing record already won him 2007 Oregon Outstanding Researcher of the Year from the Oregon Academy of Science, an award usually given to a researcher in the hard sciences.

But Ellis’ students and colleagues will tell you his great teaching and willingness to mentor others are equally deserving of recognition. Alexis Walker ’06 says Ellis “has gone out of his way to be there for me and countless other students, not because he has to, but because he genuinely cares.

“It’s a running joke among his students about how quickly he responds to email, almost as if he can telepathically sense he has a message in his inbox,” she says. “I am embarrassed to admit I never knew Professor Ellis’ office hours because he was always available and kept his door open, inviting students in.”

Walker is one of many students who worked one on one with Ellis to assist with his scholarly work while simultaneously learning how to write and research. “In the acknowledgement pages of five books, Ellis thanks 33 different Willamette undergraduates who worked as research assistants on those projects,” College of Liberal Arts Dean Carol Long says. “It is a rare undergraduate professor who has done so much to introduce his or her students to the joys and rigors of research.”

Ellis’ commitment to personal attention originates in his teaching philosophy, one he has developed during his 18 years at Willamette. “When I first arrived, I believed that my mission was to convey the subject matter I had mastered in graduate school,” he says. “I now believe the most enduring contribution I can make to the education and lives of my students is to teach them to think critically and to write clearly.

“The teaching of writing is the centerpiece of my work as a teacher. It is why I ultimately elected to remain at a small liberal arts college, for only in small classes can I devote the intensive, individualized attention that is necessary to instill in students an appreciation for clear and concise prose.”

Locavore Stocks Up for Winter

Justin Rothboeck’s local-food experiment is about to get a whole lot harder. Rothboeck is trying to eat food grown, processed and sold in Oregon or Washington for an entire year.

He started June 23. It was the heart of the farmers market season, where booths at Salem’s Wednesday and Saturday farmers markets overflowed with local berries, greens and other vegetables, and locally raised meat. But his supply of easy-to-access, locally grown food will dwindle at the end of October when the outdoor farmers markets end.

“I don’t think it will be a matter of starvation. It will be a matter of will,” Rothboeck said. “There will be enough meat and grain, but I am going to be lacking some fresh fruit and vegetables.”

He plans to binge-buy at the farmers markets, preserve fruits and vegetables for the winter and change his diet to reflect the lack of food diversity in the winter. He’ll still have Salem’s oldest farmers market to patronize — the indoor market on Rural Avenue SE — but the pickings will be slim with the cold weather.

That’s not to say that his experiment has been easy so far. In the past several months Rothboeck has been forced to make more concessions to his local diet than he would like, and has not been able to keep his daytime snacks and restaurant fare solely local.

The biggest obstacle: time.

He’s asked at various restaurants around town if their food is local. Some people don’t know. Some say they try to buy local but couldn’t be sure at any given time which food is local. Some use local meat or vegetable suppliers but don’t know where the suppliers get their food.
“I decided it was too much work to investigate,” Rothboeck said. “I sometimes wish I had an assistant to investigate these things.”

And as a Willamette University law student working at the state Department of Justice, Rothboeck doesn’t have time to plan snacks — he often has to eat on the go.

His meals at home, however, are all local, and that means more work depending on what he has an appetite for. Take spaghetti, for example. Throwing dried pasta into a pot of boiling water and heating a jar of sauce would suffice for most people.

Not someone on a Pacific Northwest diet.

Rothboeck had to make the pasta from scratch: roll it out, cut it into fettuccine-like strips and let it dry a bit.

Other must-have ingredients can foil a would-be local eater. Or at least take an entire day to make. To can jam, for example, Rothboeck needed pectin, a natural substance found in fruits that is used as a gelling agent. So he made some from apples. He’s not sure it worked.

“The efficacy of my pectin remains unverified,” he wrote in his blog on Aug. 21. “ ... the general jam recipe includes mashed blackberries, honey and liquid pectin. The problem with this mixture, and maybe I’m stating the obvious, is that it’s all liquid. First of all, I don’t think any strength of liquid pectin could solidify this mixture in the 1-minute boil time of most sugar-pectin jams. Second, I don’t know if pectin reacts with honey in the same way it reacts with sugar, or at all.”

When Rothboeck canned corn, he spent an entire day picking it and another day canning it. “It is a little nerve-racking because the consequences of not doing it properly are serious — botulism,” he said.
Even though he has had to make concessions and spend long hours preparing food, Rothboeck’s experiment has yielded some of what he had hoped. For one, he’s connected with local farmers. He knows the vendors at the farmers market by name.

He cooks more with basic ingredients instead of processed foods — meaning his food is fresher. Locally grown fruits and vegetables are usually sold within 24 hours of being harvested.
Rothboeck also has inspired others to notice where their food comes from and buy local, keeping even more money than just his own in the community. According to the Eat Local campaign by Ecotrust, buying food at a farmers market means that more than 90 cents of every dollar goes to the farmer.
Rothboeck also wants to reduce the pollution associated with food traveling thousands of miles from farm to table. In the United States, an average dinner travels 1,500 miles before being eaten. When the source of food is that far away, it is hard to determine how it was grown. Was it grown in a way that conserves soil, with fair wages to workers and without many chemical inputs — or not?

“We have a much higher likelihood in being able to gather information about production practices of food when we are closer to the source,” said Deborah Kane, vice president of the Food and Farms program at Portland-based Ecotrust. “It is easier for me to see the farmer’s practices down the road than for me to fly to Argentina to see practices.”

In the end, Rothboeck’s experiment might reveal something about human nature that is more basic than food miles traveled, money remaining in the community or agricultural practices.

“People are happier when they are connected to the landscape where they are living,” said Willamette University Professor Kimberlee Chambers, who is teaching a class this semester called the Geography of Food. “It gives people a sense of belonging. In order to appreciate something, we have to understand it.”

Reprinted courtesy of the Statesman Journal and Beth Casper

Celebrating Distinguished Artists — and the Visionary Behind The Series

A quarter century ago Music Professor Anita King decided Willamette was worthy of truly great visiting artists. She was thinking three concerts a year — scheduling a hotel, arranging some campus logistics. How hard could it be?

In founding what has since become the Grace Goudy Distinguished Artists Series, what King didn’t realize was that the job would include frantically hemming sleeves backstage, speeding a sick musician to the emergency room, and turning her office into a kennel for a visiting artist’s pooch. “I once retrieved a tuxedo from a hotel room 15 minutes before a concert,” King says. “I do it with a smile. That’s my job.”

King has been bringing the world’s most renown artists to campus — traditional folk musicians from Afghanistan, a rhythm-wild pianist from Ghana, a Latin-influenced cello octet, dazzling classical ensembles — offering a breadth and depth of music we may not otherwise experience.

“I started with a zero budget in 1982,” King says. The next year she made a deal with Willamette President Jerry Hudson. In exchange for $3,000, she agreed to rebuild and administer Willamette’s artists series with three concerts each year — and quickly discovered that $3,000 didn’t go very far. She ran the series on a shoestring budget for a decade; it now operates with support from an endowment fund established by The Collins Foundation in the 1990s to honor the late Grace Goudy ’22, one of the original trustees of the foundation.

King coordinates concerts, master classes, lectures, youth clinics, and Q and A sessions with students. She spends many hours listening to artist recordings and reviewing press packets, negotiates contracts, and arranges logistics and publicity for each concert.

The series, and King’s music career, almost didn’t happen. King went to a music camp at age 16 in order to abandon music. Her parents told her she could quit piano lessons after she attended the two-week camp. Instead, she came back on fire and threw herself into four hours a day of practice.

Her efforts paid off. King has performed throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe and South America, playing chamber music, solo recitals and concertos with orchestras. “Playing makes me feel alive,” King says. “I love bringing the audience on a journey. My job as a performer is to reveal the emotion the composer intended and allow that emotion to come through in an authentic way. It can be tempting to force or exaggerate when you’re playing in a large hall for a large audience, but performances are most poignant and powerful when a performer finds a way to give the music a natural expression. There’s an important process of trusting the innate wisdom of the composer.”

King also believes in trusting the innate wisdom of our own bodies when it comes to creating music. Her kinesthetic re-education lectures and workshops have broken new ground in the area of musicians’ health as they teach musicians of all ages, abilities and instruments a more holistic way to play.

King teaches Body Mapping along with the Alexander Technique, a method that teaches people how to avoid tensing their neck in response to a stimulus. “Tightening one’s neck pulls the head off balance, and then the entire coordination is affected,” King says. “We are all born with perfect coordination, but as we get older, we lose our natural way of moving. When we inhibit destructive motions, healthy movement is free to emerge.”

King’s approach is saving careers. It allows professionals and amateurs alike a newfound freedom of movement and illustrates a way to make music from wholeness.

The 25th anniversary season of the Grace Goudy Distinguished Artists Series will open Friday, Dec. 5, with musicians who are celebrated for their own holistic integration of body and mind. Anonymous 4, an a cappella quartet that has garnered critical international acclaim, performs haunting medieval chant and explores the interweaving melodies of polyphony.

King may be backstage that evening, hemming sleeves or rustling up odd last-minute requests, but she’ll never be far away. After 25 years, she’s got this gig down to an art form.

Scholarship Sends Student to Germany

Diana Serrano ’10 first lived in Germany for a year during high school, an opportunity she sought simply as a way to spend some time outside her small hometown.

The small-town escape soon became a passion as she fell in love with the country, its people and its language — and she chose German as one of her two majors at Willamette (the other is sociology).

“I didn’t know anything about Germany, but I’m really glad I went,” she says. “When I came back, I wanted to keep up my German, and I read a lot of German books that were translated into English. They were amazing, and I wanted to be able to read them in their original language.”

Serrano’s dedication to studying the country paid off this year when she received a prestigious DAAD Undergraduate Scholarship. DAAD stands for Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, or German Academic Exchange Service. The scholarship supports U.S. and Canadian students interested in studying, researching or completing an internship in Germany. Serrano, the first Willamette student to receive this award, is spending this academic year at Ludwigsburg University of Education in southern Germany.

German is Serrano’s third language. She was born in California and raised in Mexico and Woodburn, Ore., by a Spanish-speaking family, and she is the first in her family to attend college. Her family’s immigrant status and her interest in sociology prompted her desire to study Germany’s school system while she’s in the country.

“From what I’ve seen of the school system there, it doesn’t seem to offer much help to immigrants because people there aren’t as used to seeing immigrants as [they are] in the United States. I know what it’s like to be an immigrant and not know the language and the culture, and I’m interested in studying sociology in another country. Sociology helps me understand the world and my place in it.”

Serrano has also dedicated herself to reaching out to other cultures while on campus. She has taken two trips through Take a Break (TaB), an alternative spring break program that allows students and employees to perform service across the country and reflect on social justice issues. She spent one semester tutoring Native American high school students at nearby Chemawa Indian School, and she tutors at Willamette Academy, a program that supports economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse middle- and high-school students and encourages them on the path to college.

While she isn’t yet certain where her studies will take her after graduation, she knows her language skills will be invaluable. “I would like to do some sort of interpreting, more with German but maybe also with Spanish. Whatever I do for a career, I want to make sure it has an international focus.”

To learn more about national scholarships, contact Monique Bourque in the Student Academic Grants and Awards office on the third floor of Putnam University Center, or visit www.willamette.edu/dept/saga.

A New Generation of Activism

Stephen Lewis, who recently completed a term as the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, didn’t mince words when he addressed Willamette’s new students at convocation in August. The fast-talking Canadian diplomat’s emotionally charged speech offered a mix of research and personal anecdotes to convey the tragedies of AIDS and gender inequality worldwide. His plea to the students was urgent: You, the next generation of potential activists, can do something about these problems.

Will Nevius ’09 was in the audience that day, but these weren’t new ideas to him. Nevius, a politics major, had already met Lewis earlier in the summer at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City — the latest in the student’s long list of activist efforts. It’s no surprise that Nevius calls Lewis one of his heroes.

“He has this amazing presence, and he’s not afraid to have this critical voice,” Nevius says. “He’s a change agent wherever he is, whether he’s inside or outside the machine.”

Those words could also apply to Nevius, who, like Lewis, talks fast when discussing the political issues that hold his attention. His leadership and continued advocacy for social justice were recently recognized with a scholarship from the Pride Foundation, a Pacific Northwest organization that makes grants to nonprofit foundations, awards scholarships to students, and supports grassroots organizing around lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. Nevius is the first Willamette student to receive this scholarship.

Nevius has done extensive policy and community organizing for nonprofits, serves on Willamette’s Council for Diversity and Social Justice and is on the board for the Oregon Student Equal Rights Alliance. His research interests include the nation’s LGBT homeless youth epidemic, and last year he helped facilitate a group to support at-risk LGBT youth in the area.

Fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been one of Nevius’s causes since he was in high school. During his first year at Willamette, he co-founded a campus chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC), a national grassroots movement that is the largest student network committed to ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic worldwide. At the time, Willamette was the only university in the Pacific Northwest with a chapter. Nevius now serves as SGAC’s national student coordinator and travels monthly to Washington, D.C., to help plan the organization’s efforts.

Last spring, Nevius explored the cultures, history and political dynamics of South Africa while studying at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. “South Africa is truly a ‘rainbow nation’ trying to create a democracy the whole country can believe in. It’s the country running on hope. Experiences like seeing Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak really brought this home for me.”

He also continued his efforts to fight HIV/AIDS by working for the director of the Rafael Centre, an organization that travels to townships and informal settlements in the Eastern Cape to offer AIDS testing and counseling.

“I decided that if I really want to work on these issues, this was the place I needed to go,” he says. “Being in an uncomfortable situation is sometimes the best place to learn, and I definitely got that. There are 11 official languages in South Africa. It’s not Salem anymore.”

Spending a semester in a country still working to overcome years of pain from apartheid showed Nevius the real effects of social and racial inequality.

“I would look at Grahamstown, which has extreme poverty and an unemployment rate of about 70 percent, and then I would go back to school at Rhodes where there were security guards every 30 feet so outsiders couldn’t come onto campus. It was odd navigating both worlds.”

Inequality also carries over to the way many countries fight diseases like AIDS, he says. “We have the science to keep people alive for decades, yet people continue dying, even though it’s a completely preventable and treatable disease. In order to stop its spread, we have to look at it as a political issue.”

After he graduates this spring, Nevius hopes to head to Washington, D.C., to gain experience in the offices of progressive legislators on Capitol Hill, or possibly to work with nonprofits to fight inequality. No matter where Nevius lands, Lewis’s words will likely remain with him: The students of his generation are inheriting the world, and it’s their responsibility to make it a better place.

To learn more about national scholarships, contact Monique Bourque in the Student Academic Grants and Awards office on the third floor of Putnam University Center, or visit www.willamette.edu/dept/saga.